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Saturday, November 08, 2008

New UM VC appointed

Hot off the press - Dr. Ghauth Jasmon has been picked as the latest VC of UM. According to the bio page of Unity College International, where he is the current CEO, "Prof Ghauth Jasmon graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1979 and the PhD degree in Power Systems Engineering in 1982 from the University of London." Before his current appointment at UCI, he was the president of MMU.

My first thoughts on this appointment is to wonder if the Minister of Higher Education, Khaled Nordin, actually went through a VC selection committee, something which Tok Pa, the former Minister had promised, was to be a permanent committee. Tony has blogged extensively on this issue before including here and here. If this committee was tasked with the job of searching for a replacement for Rafiah Salim, it must have done its work very quietly since we never heard about its work anywhere. My suspicion is that they were probably not consulted at all, if such a committee still exists. This sets a bad precedent for future VC appointments under the current Minister of Higher Education since there is no guarantee that the candidate eventually selected would have gone through a thorough screening process.

This being said, at least the new appointee, Dr. Ghauth Jasmon, has more academic and administrative experience compared to Rafiah Salim. He was fast tracked to become the head of the Electrical Engineering department only 4 years after he obtained his PhD from UOL. He made professor 10 years after he obtained his PhD. He was appointed Deputy VC in 1995, 12 years after he obtained his PhD. (All this was at UM) Clearly a fast riser.

I'm not sure when he was appointed president of MMU but he started working there in 1997 and stepped down in 2007. During this time, he seemed to have overseen a rapid increase in the number of students as well as the building of infrastructure there.

He has both experience in the private as well as public university setting. He knows UM well since he taught there for more than 15 years. He oversaw the establishment and growth of MMU, one of the better homegrown private universities in Malaysia, in my humble opinion. Utilizing these skills, he might be a good candidate to oversee some positive changes at UM.

One possible knock on him is that I couldn't find many publications attributed to him when I did a quick search on google scholar. Perhaps some of our readers who are Electrical Engineers can do a better search on him and enlighten us as to his academic record. I also hope that our readers who graduated from MMU can enlighten us as to his record as President of MMU. From a few blog posts I've read, he seems to be someone who is 'on-the-ball' and pretty responsive to the demands on students.

We'll be keeping an eye out on him I'm sure. And I'm sure that Tony will weigh in on his own thoughts on this appointment as well.

82 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I am a fellow MMU student. Prof Ghauth was literally made "retired" from MMU early this year. The news really surprised us all. I would say that Prof Ghauth is open minded individual and he is certainly not a racially biased person. Academic wise frankly speaking I think he has ceased to produce much research after being promoted to administrative position. Much publication are produced in his early years.

He is a Fellow of the IEE, Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, Senior Member of the IEEE and an Eisenhower Fellow...as far as i know, for academician to get a fellowship or senior member is not easy at all...you need to publish a quality journal papers and have significant contribution on that field. you can refer to IEEE website. He is also an eisenhower fellow(leadership fellow) which is incredibly tough to get. Only 25 candidates from all over the world are chosen every year for that fellowship. you can check from eisenhower website

his journal and conference publication is very difficult to retrieve online..maybe because during his time data is not stored in database/online.but his fellowship tell us something (he must have been publishing good journals). super difficult to get fellowship of IEE, IEEE or ACM.

yes i agree, sometimes the lecturer need to add some marks to moderate the result. But once again, i think the lecturer is the one who is stupid. Believe me the lecturers in mmu actually set the question very difficult and at the end the failure rate is very high, thus they have to add maybe 15 marks as mentioned by one of the anonymous. They made the questions so difficult and they are not willing to help the students such as giving extra class or tutorial. You should be proud to educate people, not be proud of your difficult high quality questions. Another thing they always complain that mmu students are not that good. They want high quality students. Again, the lecturer have to look at the mirror and reflect to their self. They cant even publish papers and teach well, and yet they complain. If the students failure is high, meaning that the lecturer is not a good educator and motivator. shame on anonymous who complain about this. "If you want good/top students, then you have to be good also. If you want mmu to be like MIT or harvard, then the lecturers CV must be like the lecturer in MIT or harvard".

true!! mmu lecturers think that they are good by setting difficult questions and proud with the high failure rate. the truth, they are poor educator. shame on them. if any universities like harvard, they dont have to moderate marks since the students and lecturers are 1st class. sure not many fail.

"Go ask any MMU staff, nobody miss him there." - when prof ghauth left, many top and good people left. they cant stand with the current mmu management. so the haters and the dead wood remains there. of course they dont miss him. they want to destroy mmu with the freedom they have. mmu is not popular anymore. dont come to mmu. is there anyone who would like to buy mmu from TM? they are running out of money.

i am a mmu graduate, the fact is u losers know prof ghauth will force the lecturers to add marks for you and you do not bother to study and party all nights long, and you expect lecturers to pass you. the truth is mmu lecturers have to make the exam easier and easier so that they do not have to fail losers like the commenters above, why would they make it hard when they still have to pass these losers? I know because i was a student there and my brother also studying there now. My good lecturers are mostly still there, those who left are ghauth's cronies. mmu lecturers are much better than lecturers from other unis in malaysia, dun compare harvard or mit when mmu have losers like comenters above.

You losers better watch out if u still there, because I heard now there is no more such stupid policies to simply pass the students now. Less losers like you means more quality students in mmu. If you dun like mmu, go to um and make another longest kebab with ghauth jasmoon. only losers like u like the longest shit.

"One possible knock on him is that I couldn't find many publications attributed to him when I did a quick search on google scholar. Perhaps some of our readers who are Electrical Engineers can do a better search on him and enlighten us as to his academic record."

A search on Web of Science gave me 41 results for Jasmon G*, most attributed to Jasmon GB.

Sorted by 'times cited', one gets an h-index of 9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number

Many of his high-citation papers are published in IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEE Proceedings - Generation, Transmission and Distribution and the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems.

I could not find impact factors for these, but will maybe try harder later.

(As much as I don't like the h-index and impact factors, it's the only way I can evaluate people and journals from other fields, aside from asking a friend in the field.)

Anonymous (11/08/2008 07:14:00 PM) said...for academician to get a fellowship or senior member is not easy at all...you need to publish a quality journal papers and have significant contribution on that field.

You are totally wrong on this! It is not difficult to become a Fellow of IEE or a Senior Member of IEEE. Many of my friends hold these two titles. They told me that you only need good connections and can be easily obtained through nomination.

But for Fellow of IEEE, that is a different story - you really need to publish a lot of quality papers and contribute a lot to a particular field. That is the reason why we have lots of Fellow of IEE or Senior Members of IEEE, but not a single Fellow of IEEE in Malaysia (I mean Malaysian)!

I have friends working as academics both in UM and MMU. I also know Prof. Ghauth Jasmon personally. Let me share with you what I know from them.

On MMU:1. Prof. Ghauth Jasmon is not a racist. He promotes staff mostly based on merits (plus a little bit of cronism).2. The success of MMU is largely due to the contributions made by Prof. HT Chuah (currently UTAR's President). Most of the time, it's Prof. Chuah (ex-Vice President of MMU in charge of Academic and R&D) that runs the show in MMU.3. It is true that Prof. Ghauth Jasmon does not have truly impressive publications list. I believe this is not very crucial to become a good President/VC.

UM:1. The reason why the MoHE did not renew the contract of Rafiah Salim are:

a. She was very demanding on staff's performance, wanting them to publish 2 journals per year (so don't expect the deadwoods can achieve this!). Many are unhappy with her due to this.

b. She gave speech freedom (compared to the past VC) to students and staff who criticize the BN government often. Thus UMNO is not happy.

In my opinion, even if Prof. Ghauth Jasmon becomes the VC of UM, I don't think it will help UM much unless he has more power. The reason is very simple - too many deadwoods professors and deans are still in UM. These deadwoods are unsackable under JPA rules unless that commit serious offenses. These deadwoods just want to keep their job until retirement to get life pension. They will do whatever they can to stop UM from recruiting the truly good scholars as the latter will make them look very stupid. Without good academic, UM is going nowhere.

Lastly, it's true that now MMU no longer simply passes losers like the above who failed the exam. Keep in mind that many universites also pass students who fail the exam (including Monash and Nottingham in Malaysia).

They are still plenty of good academic in MMU. Only the cronies of Prof. Ghauth Jasmon and Prof. Chuah left MMU. Quality wise, MMU is still much better than UM. Although UM always get the best student, but their potential is not fully exploited due to poor-quality staff in UM.

The biggest criteria of a IEEE senior member is that you must be an IEEE member for some years. You should have some publications as well, but just a few will do. There is really no big deal being IEEE members or senior members, do not trust anyone that blag about it, it just mean he has been paying his membership fees, nothing else. Many academician do not bother to subscribe as members since they can get all the materials free from their library subscription. IEEE is getting too commercialized lately, for your information.

That is right, all ghauth did was talk craps, almost all mmu staff considered chuah to be the de facto president.

Together with ghauth, chuah rule mmu with an iron fist, the only staff that benefited are their cronies. Chuah's engineering phd grad was made IT dean right after graduating, he is now IT professor in UTAR, these are the cronies who have left mmu, they can't stand without their masters.

Anonymous 11/09/2008 01:56:00 PM got the facts right. Professor Chuah HT, a very good researcher, and also formerly from EE Dept, UM, virtually has a free hand to run MMU. Prof. Chuah is the youngest member of the Malaysian Academy of Science.

As key performance indicators, Datuk Rafiah Salim has required that UM lecturers publish 2 papers. But these papers need not be in international journals. In fact in one Faculty two international Conference proceeding papers (not peer reviewed) equal one paper publication. Some leeway has been allowed.

UM has too many deadwood academics (admittedly there some good ones). Academics with poor research record are still promoted by the just retired VC based on advice from the Deans/Heads. Although there are fairly strict conditions for promotion, for example, at least 6 ISI publications and favourable reviews (peer and external accessor)for promotion to Assoc. Prof., criteria like these are applied selectively or circumvented. It's interesting to see if changing the "Head" (VC) so often will do anything to a "very sick body" (UM).There is hope for UM if deadwoods can be phased out and good young lecturers recruited.

Another observation: During Prof. Jasmon's tenure as President of MMU, many of the MMU academics are retired UM staff and young PhD holders from UM. Some have left with Prof. Chuah HT to join UTAR.

In UM, when it comes to promotion, a friend of my working in UM told me that they still practice racism, e.g., although it's an unwritten rule, non-bumi need double the amount of publications as compared to bumi in order to get promoted for the same position. Thus the morale for non-bumi academic is low.

In addition, for every academic level before you apply for promotion, you need to go through some PTK training and pass the exam. If you fail, you need to retake the training and exam. It's kind of waste of time and troublesome for many.

prof ghauth has done a good job by hiring prof chua, eventhough the first 3 to 5 years, mostly he did everything by himself (without deputy). if he hired wrong person to look after the academic, let say he favor malay instead based on merit, then mmu will not achieve this level of success. there is nothing wrong for prof chuah to recommended someone that is close to him to prof ghauth for certain position if that person is qualified and best among the candidates. if you think mmu has a good lecturers and reputation, than that must be credited to everyone who has contributed to the success from the beginning. if not because of them, mmu is nothing to this date. i feel nowadays people like to talk about people weaknesses and downside rather than contribute to make the uni and nation great. even what they talk is from what they hear. nothing really is fact. please proof by showing written documents if it is true. for muslim, i just want to remind you that whatever you said that is not true is a fitnah, and a fitnah is a big sin, and hell is the destination for wrong doers.

"i feel nowadays people like to talk about people weaknesses and downside rather than contribute to make the uni and nation great"

when a person is in public office and in leadership position, we can't just ignore his weaknesses, it may be too late if we find out later, just look at all our politicians and all the recent VCs etc..

ok i agree, but please provide proof. don't simply said i heard from this guy and bla2. otherwise it may not be true at all. and it is really bad to say something that is not true (without proof/fact). after all, no one has said that prof is not qualified for the job. no one, not even in other blogs (from what i have browse through and read from other blogs). i would like to conclude what people said - he has a good vp in mmu that helps him run the uni even though people dont like him, he appoints staff base on merits regardless of race/gender, he is nice to the students, he imposed some restriction on percentage of failure (even though what many commenter said were not true. during prof ghauth presidency, i have one subject with failure percentage around 60% and i chose not to moderate the mark. mmu allowed me to do so but i have to write a comprehensive report. that's all. the percentage of failure remains. its normal for uni to control such thing and they want us to be more responsible), hardworker (normally comes to work from 7.30am until 10.00pm).

Anonymous "11/09/2008 08:43:00 PM"'s comments are fair.Prof. Ghauth Jasmon has chosen his deputy on merit, not based on colour or creed. Prof. Chuah, at that time an Assoc. Prof. at UM's Dept of EE, has been hesistant to leave UM. Looking back he has made the right decision (refer to remarks of Anon 11/09/2008 04:11:00 PM). Even though Professor Chuah has run MMU with an "iron fist", he has set the standards and made MMU reputable. MMU is a private university and has been "built from scratch" whereas UM, the oldest public university in Malaysia, is burdened with various policies and deadwoods that will make it a daunting task for any VC to rise it from mediocrity. Good luck to Professor Ghauth Jasmon.

1. Ghauth Jasmon is a wise pick for UM. He is a very forward-thinking individual who is very merit-based when it comes to staffing and promotion.2. A well-executed administrative duty does not necessary correlate to scientific/engineering publications. I do not understand the reason for all those googling for publications (Web of Science can provide a more thorough data pull if necessary but then again, that is not my point). Kian Ming, years down the road after your Ph.D., when you revisit all your blogs with emphasis on # of "publications", you will realise that an academician's reputation and impact are better indicators. Impact factor is also irrelevant because it can be skewed due to a vicious reinforcing cycle. If you look at historical data, there are many firsts which are published in low impact-factor journals, especially from Europe and Japan which have far-reaching impact in science.

Rafiah Salim has indeed done a good job during these 2.5 years. She is democratic, open minded and ambitious. The only reason I see her contract not renewed is because UMNO does not like her for allowing UM staff to criticize BN and support RPK openly.

I personally think that Prof. Ghauth Jasmon can't really do much about UM because of the limited power he has. Imagine you are just being appointed as the CEO of a company that is continuously making losses for many years due to incompetent and lazy staff. If you don't have the power to replace these staff, how do you save the company from making losses?

The reason that Prof. Ghauth Jasmon was made to retire from MMU early this year is because he was not obedient to TM. Thus unless he is obedient to UMNO, his tenure in UM will suffer the same fate as Rafiah Salim.

Weng Hong,Good comment about impact factor of journals. The Australian Research Council has done away with measuring research publications by impact factors. It's important for a VC to be a reputable academician so as to command respect and to provide academic leadership. An example is Professor Shih Choon Fong of NUS who will be the President of Saudi Arabia's ambitious King Abdullah Univ. of S & T next month.

Prof Ghauth is a very nice guy and very fun to talk to, staff and students also like him very much as far as his personality is concerned.

However, as for running of MMU, he just give the free hand to Prof Chuah to rule MMU with an iron fist. It seems Prof Chuah is the head of almost every committees in MMU and he put all his cronies as Dean of every faculties even though these Deans are not in the fields they are heading.

Prof. Ghauth is not at all know the problems faced by the staff and for 10 years he had about only 1 or 2 dialogue sessions with the teaching staff, though he has dialogue sessions with the students many times a year.

MMU success is due to all the publicities by the government and the fact it is situated in the heart of MSC. Because of that it managed to attract a huge group of local young and hard working lecturers and many of them are still working very hard now in MMU, some work until even midnight everyday. Most of them are doing their PhD at the same time, unfortunately for them Prof. Ghauth (rather Prof. Chuah) insisted that they must finish their PhD within 3 years while having to lecture all year round for 3 trimesters per year and tons of administrative works which happened to mostly fall on these poor local staff. PhD is not an easy task and it is virtually impossible to do that in this kind of situation. These are the actual people who built MMU, not Ghauth who sit in his office and the only thing he knew how to do is talk and be a typical politician, while making longest kebab.

One can not be a good leader or manager if one do not even listen to their staff's problems.

Ghauth and Chuah may be good academicians, all these talk about impact factors make me laugh as it missed the points (Ghuath's publication is not considered a lot by the way). Being a good academician is not enough to be a VC. Ghauth did not run MMU, it is Chuah. MMU is a small university with only 4 faculties in each of its two campuses, and yet Ghauth and Chuah failed miserably to manage their very dedicated staff in a realistic way, I do not see Ghauth is able to manage such a huge bunch of deadwoods!

Being a good academician is not good enough to be a VC, we need a good manager and more importantly we need a good leader.

Unlike those days when Prof. Ghauth was in MMU, he can 'force' those he does not like to leave.

With the huge bunch of deadwoods still hanging around in UM under permanent contract, there is nothing much Prof. Ghauth can do to improve UM.

UM is hopeless unless UMNO is willing to give a free hand to the VC to replace the deadwoods with good ones. I don't think UMNO will take this risk. They never see the true problem, they never want to change to solve the problem.

According to the MMU (Multimedia University) second President since January 2008, who is Prof. Zaharin, he indirectly verified that there were once more than 100 MMU Malaysian local permanent staff including the academicians who were not yet confirmed after a long period in years. So far as I know, this probation period has record in my mind up to 9 years and may be even more.

At this time, there were about 1600 MMU staff and half of them are academicians. Among the academicians, some are foreigners under contract and some are local Malaysians. For local academic Malaysian staff, some are confirmed permanent staff, some are probationary permanent staff, and some are contractual staff.

Prof. Ghauth Jasmon is the MMU first president serving from 1997 to December 2007. Since he had broken the employment bond from UM to work at MMU, he had also brought lots of UM (University of Malaya) staff, especially the electrical engineering (EE) department to work at MMU. Due to this reason, the then undergraduate students of UM in EE had their course structures changed due to the insufficient staff at the EE department.

Then, at MMU, Tun Dr. Mahathir directed that MMU was established to lead the Malaysia in the Malaysia MSC (Multimedia Supercorridor Project) in this challenging new era of ICT (Information Communications Technologies), particularly, and knowledge economy, generally.

Nevertheless, due to reason that the then MMU management could only manage to recruit the self-claimed genius of Prof. Chuah Hean Teik majoring in microwave remote sensing. MMU could only flourish in the research field related to electromagnetics (EM) like microwave remote sensing and antenna.

Nevertheless, since Prof. Ghauth had left the MMU, Prof. Chuah Hean Teik followed his step to leave MMU as well to join UTAR (Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman) as UTAR President. Sadly, the case of UM in 1997 happened again when Prof. Chuah brought some experienced MMU staff to join UTAR. This should have caused the restructuring of some courses offered by MMU as well as like the UM EE department in 1997.

No wonder how we think, there shall exist someone thinking that do these situations are responsible or not.

Yup, a reminder here, Telekom Malaysia (TM) being the mother company of MMU, has paid up a share capital of MYR$650 million into MMU.

After Prof. Ghauth Jasmon has serviced as MMU President from 1997 to 2007, it is a question on how good he has performed to meet or even exceed the Tun Mahathir's expectation for MMU to excel in the ICT field. Or may be we could only the MMU best performance in the research field of EM.

Lastly, I would like to remind here that MMU under the Prof. Ghauth Jasmon has serious office politics fighting and lots of resources have been wasted. Don't know who the dark hands are behind the curtain. However, to remind here, the MMU HR Director and Security Director stepped down following the Prof. Ghauth's so called "retirement".

When the EM (electromagnetics) experts have left, there also exist questions on who are so smart enough to learn, apply, and research based on the hardware and software in the field of EM that MMU first President, Prof. Ghauth Jasmon, has invested a lot.

As I know, we can refer to the case at UM EE department in 1997 till now, the books, hardware, and software in electromagntics (EM) are all abandoned like that and there is almost none a researcher at UM EE department majoring in EM anymore. It is a question if MMU will also be like that after investing so much research money in EM.

I am one of the final year students at MMU doing final year project, I'm really frustrated when I came to know that my supervisor left halfway to UTAR while supervising my project...those left without considering other factors one are really selfish bunch of people and I want to prove to them that they are actually wrong jumping to UTAR by doing exceptionally well in my project...

Is ok, you are not the only one. Me too. I am in my half way to complete my MEng by research but, oh, where is my supervisor :(

As far as I know, some PhD students just lost their supervisors when the jump-ship happened. Right now, they still don't know what to do. Those, "you jump, I jump" staffs are mainly the Iron Man Kaki. Once they join UTAR, they will receive award from the Iron Man, a "Prof" + better salary. So, why not, let's jump-jump together loh, Prof woh,

When Chuah was the de facto President in MMU, he appointed his doorkeeper Ewe HT (his PhD grad) as the Dean of IT right after getting his PhD, what field he is in? LMAO... EM ! He knew nothing of IT other than bull-shitting all the politicians like Ghauth Jasmon. Now look what happened to the School of IT? Full of a bunch of Chuah's and Ewe's doorkeepers.

By the way, before Ewe HT jumped ship to UTAR, he was temp became VP and he appointed his own doorkeeper who has yet to get PhD at that time as Dean of IT, he was a tutor a few years ago. LMAO.

"After Prof. Ghauth Jasmon has serviced as MMU President from 1997 to 2007, it is a question on how good he has performed to meet or even exceed the Tun Mahathir's expectation for MMU to excel in the ICT field. Or may be we could only the MMU best performance in the research field of EM"

Well, what to do when Ghauth, Chuah and their sidekick IT Dean think that a Pentium II is good enough for their IT lecturers... some of my lecturers last year was still using Pentium II with 4Gb hard disk and 256 Mb RAM, their computers can't even run our assignments. Sadly many students like Ghauth and sidekicks very much, because they make life very easy for them, party all night longs also can pass la, what the problem kawan...

Associate prof that is not qualified to be professor in MMU is made as professor at UTAR. Does it mean associate professor of MMU equal to professor of UTAR? If it is true then UTAR is at least a class loer than MMU.

Let's how this bunch of "professor" (EHT, CBK, FAR, LSW) can produce ISI cited papers before their comfirmation without MMU researchers. One may know that any publications from the principal researcher, it is mandatory to put VP of RND, dean, associate dean, crony etc... as co-authors. A search ISI cited papers for these "professor", the number ranges from 3 to 8, which is far below, the minimum mark of 15 cited papers to be qualified for an application to be professor in UTAR set by the new president.

OMG! You mean those jump-ship Prof are not met the requirements of 15 cited papers but they had promoted as Prof in UTAR? Oh, the power of Iron Man is truly strong. If this has been known by other UTAR academic staffs, I am sure they will be very upset :(

I know the Fantastic Four. They are the followers of Iron Man. The 1st class crony.

I think what anon (11/14/2008, 06:05pm) meant was those profs might not have 15 cited papers with themselves as first author or chief investigator. If calculate in only those carrying their names (not necessary 1st or communication author), I am sure all of them fulfill the 15 cited paper requirements though.

BTW It is rather common among Malaysian academics to have such long names on author list of publication, where the real people involved is just a few. Is this "kawan tolong kawan"?

Truly UTAR is not comparable to other IPT after iron man sails this ship.Sr Lecturer of MMU = AP of UTAR.Feedback from MMU, CBK has less than one year of AP appointment in MMU, he was made P in UTAR in 09/08. This is the true standard of UTAR.The MOHE assessment criteria for appointment of P are research and publication, teaching and supervision, and contribution to university and community. I wonder these Ps have met other criteria beside hardly met criterion 1, especially contribution to UTAR. They did not contribute to building of UTAR started in 2002. How about three external assessors reports? How about peer-review reports? Do they receive excellent recommendation? I do not think they have these reports needless to talk about recommendation.A friend from a party told me that CHT was offered a job in UTAR in 2003 but he rejected the offer b'cos he thought UTAR had no hope. Every one knows where is he now?

I'm curious about the views and feeling of current faculty in UTAR about the promotion of the iron man's cronies, specially those the post held by previous faculty and suddenly being replaced by the man's cronies, how do you all feel?

Actually before the so-called "fantastic four" enter UTAR, how is the quality of UTAR staff? Are there also "deadwood" professors? Having said they are "cronies", how are their performance relative to the current UTAR staff? Any UTAR student or staff can comment about this?

The Fantastic Four not only made to be fast track Prof. They also being assigned to take up important position like director, dean ....

I am very sure they do not have more than 15 cited papers as first author publication.

I also like to know how those fast track Prof able to get a similar position in Monash Malaysia or Nottingham Malaysia.

Just received a mail from a friend who is an assistants prof in UTAR. He said, many of them are not very happy with Iron Man arrangement and promotion given to Fantastic Four because they contribute nothing to UTAR and yet they received better rewards.

My view is that the president wanted to inject some young blood. Those in UTAR whose position were taken over are near/over retirement age. The professor position was probably given because the pay at UTAR lower compared to MMU, so how else to attract them over.

I know that ex-prof from UM is only given Sr. lecturer post in Monash University. This is the type of standard UTAR should seek. UTAR is a non-profit organisation. I believe the wage for academic staff is lower. But after adjustment as mention by an anonymous earlier, it is now comparable. It is a stupid act by given prof position just to get higher pay. One cannot say he pays the BMW price to buy a Kia car(if one is stupid enough), he calls that Kia car a BMW car. A Kia is Kia and a BMW is a BMW. They have different quality and value.A friend from UTAR told me that existing prof of UTAR (beside the four) were once the prof of IPTA. They are given prof post as a mutual respect to the IPTA.

On appointment of VC, former Universiti Malaya vice-chancellor Rafiah Salim told Malaysiakini, "They have a right to appoint a monkey if they want.."

Well, now they got one monkey indeed. Ghauth Jasmon had turn Multimedia University into Monkey University, it will take years for the new MMU President to correct all the mess created by GJ... rather should I say by Iron Man and his Fantastic Four while GJ busy traveling all over the world promoting MMU a.k.a. selling gems stone for G&J Gems Sdn Bhd.

The biggest piece of deadwood UM has currently is Rafiah's bag carrier, Prof Datok, etc etc Amin Jalaludin. This fella can’t string a sentence in proper English....and is yet the University's Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academics!!!!! How in God's name is UM going to improve...The medical faculty he used to head is dead and gone, and just to make sure he doesn’t loose his power base he has appointed his half baked cronies to run the show....The medic faculty with it's haphazard development and ghost buildings looks like is firmly going to be buried 6 feet under. It used to be UM's crown jewel but now with it's unwritten policy that all staff right from attendant till Matron must be Malay has destroyed the University's once prestigious name. The Minister of Education must be praised for wanting to do something to raise the standards of UM....but it is crucially at this time that he must support and not abandon Jasmon. The real battle in improving UM's standard's lie in getting rid of it's deadwood The Minister must help Jasmon in getting rid of these jokers who are just hanging on to UM and dragging it to the grave....

Please read the essay by David Baltimore (1975 Nobel Laureate): A Global Perspective on Science and Technology, published in Science, 24 October 2008, Volume 322, pages 544-551. This essay is adapted from the Presidential Address David Baltimore delivered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Boston on 14 February 2008.

After reading it, then we will realise that it does not matter who takes over as the VC of UM. The external and internal political forces or interferences (that do not know that building excellence takes time and the right group of talented people, regardless of nationalities and racial groups) will prevent anyone, even David Baltimore, from functioning effectively as the VC of UM.

I was a staff of MMU until 2008. I left for good, not because Ghauth is no longer there. The fact is that Ghauth ruled MMU like iron fist! Only a few top people prospered when he was the president. These people are no longer with MMMU now.

What else can we be proud of? Nothing actually. All unis are the same laaa...we have our own strengths and weaknesses..but ghauth weakness is of course, girls!! hahahaaa...mana boley tahan! He's the one who takut bini but has big heart to marry again!